AGRICULTURE
>>
TERVIVA
Pongamia
vegetable
oil is high in
oleic acid.
TCBusiness.com 11
citrus might return to its former glory.
Researchers have been hard at work developing
disease-resistant rootstock, but
progress has been heartbreakingly slow.
What’s been needed is a replacement
crop that could revive growers’ fortunes.
A number of alternative crops have been
tried on the Treasure Coast, including
biofuel plantings, blueberries, pomegranates,
peaches and pineapples. Yet all have
proven to have commercial shortcomings
— biological or economic.
However, an answer to the citrus conundrum
may be just around the corner in
the form of a tree that grows wild in India,
Australia and parts of Southeast Asia.
Pongamia is a tree crop with several
key advantages over citrus. It grows wild
in India, where its pods have traditionally
been crushed to yield lamp oil. The leftover
meal is often used for livestock feed
or fertilizer.
Now, a 9-year-old American startup, Ter-
Viva, looks poised to revolutionize Florida
agriculture by commercializing pongamia
to produce a biofuel, fertilizer feedstock
or food-grade commodity. TerViva officials
tout the tree as a plug-in replacement for
citrus. It requires little irrigation or algaeinducing
fertilizer and can outperform the
TERVIVA
One cost advantage of pongamia is the ability to mechanically harvest the crop of bean pods using mechanical harvesters originally designed to pick pistachio
nuts in California. The machines shake each tree to release the pods.
/TCBusiness.com